If you want hardware assembly get a few old notebooks that would be thrown away either way. Kids tend to break stuff when learning and I don’t think you’d want them to do that to an actual phone that is intended for further use.

A Laptop is also much larger than the phones and there are more components to learn about and play around with.

My two cents.

What the fuck are you on about?

Your comment makes literally no sense in any way. A port can break really easily and why is a phone rusting a benchmark for you? Why did you bring up the screen? Do you know anything about phones?

If I wanted I could stop typing right now, turn my phone around and have that usb C port replaced within 5 minutes.

Have done it before on my boyfriend’s fairphone 4 and no doubt your average user could do it within half a hour.